The Berlin Filmfestspiele
has been good at these for decades. So good we almost take its ministrations
for granted. Shining a torch into the hellish, heinous and horrendous, as a
movie arena it has learned from experience. A city once cracked in two, whose
crack extended upwards to the sky, knows about schism and disunity. A city
once host to history’s most hated man, whose bunker is a tourist stopover,
knows about the inhumanities humans can devise for each other.

So two films jump out at Berlin, perfect,
terrible and dazzling. Masterly in their admonitions to us, to everyone and
to all who come after.

BelaTarr’s
THE TURIN HORSE is from the stables of the apocalypse. The Hungarian
filmmaker derided by some for crafting works of torturous minimalism
(SATANTANGO, WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES) – and loved by others for the same
reason – states this will be his last film. How apt that it shares a festival
with an Ingmar Bergman retrospective. Like Bergman, Tarr’s
greeting to his audience is always: “Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll soon
deal with that.”

Ralph Fiennes’s CORIOLANUS is stupendous
screen Shakespeare. The actor turned actor-director turns a notoriously
‘difficult’ play upside down, shaking it for the gleam of loose change. It
really does seem as if the Bard set
his play in the 21st century Balkans,
where Fiennes and team – working out of Belgrade – make their Roman hero live
again. And die, slain by his refusal to play the Realpolitik game. This play about honour and dishonour, about integrity
and time-serving, is so modern it can hurt. Here it does.

Both movies have the impact of turning
over a stone and discovering a portal to hell. Not just worms and
creepy-crawlies, but a shaft, a tunnel, to the worst inferno there is.

BelaTarr
is keen on Satan. And in a way on God. The forces of woe in THE TURIN HORSE
appear to be of the Devil’s and the Deity’s combined making – always a good
team when persuaded, like a rock group, to get back together again. But Tarr, though mystically inclined, has the time and vision
to fault mankind. Human beings are as much the problem for him,
and perhaps the solution if they would only knuckle down.

Nature is a foe too and, handed the
opportunity, will give nurture a good drubbing. Then there’s Nietzsche, who
engenders the film’s source anecdote overvoiced in
the prologue, in which the Turin-dwelling philosopher embraces, sobbing with
seeming sympathy, a recalcitrant cab horse in the street outside his home.
(True story). Nietzsche, we are told, spent the rest of his life in a
mysterious torpor, writing no further works.

Is the horse in the movie that horse? Who knows.
We are told nothing, we are just shown. In a tremendous opening sequence we
see the mare towing her cart, straining against mist and wind to carry her
bearded, whitehaired master back to his
smallholding in a blasted, howling plain. We see the daily ritual whereby the
daughter dresses and feeds the father (one boiled potato each, in a wooden
bowl), helps him harness and feed the horse, fetches water from a well made almost unreachable by the violent wind,
undresses the father for bed……

It’s all in black and white, like a
commercial for despair. Or a plea for the final (dis)solution. The horse goes
off his food, the wind lays ever fiercer siege, the
bottle of palinka (a stomach-firing liqueur)
dwindles to dregs. Over the 150 minutes or five days of story time the
dwelling is taken over by a kind of slow-motion chaos, a spiral of doom.
Halfway through, a cartful of gypsies visit in a macabre vignette, rowdying at the well and stealing water. (The well dries
up the following day). One gypsy leaves the daughter a book full of
crypto-scriptural warnings.

The film’s trajectory is surely a reverse
Creation: a progress towards no-life and even, in the last scene, no-light.
Instead of “lux fiat”, “nox fiat.” Sin and
transgress enough (Tarr seems to say) – and who
knows what covert biblical misdeeds this mysterious parent-child couple have
committed? – and God and providence will blacken the
world. Either that or providence does it all itself, with no need for moral
justification and no credit for an omniscient judgment call.

That’s a comfort for unbelievers. They
like to believe the world can do its own self-destruction. Enact its own back-to-front Genesis. Reverse creation? Style
fits subject. Visually and aurally THE TURIN HORSE reinvents the wheel. It
even uninvents it, restoring us to a primitivism where the still image barely
reaches out to other images to spark the miracle of Persistence of Vision.
It’s a film of blazing stasis, dazzling inertia. It exercises a choke-hold on
the viewer, who can’t and won’t escape. This kind of incarceration is too
good not to endure and enjoy.

CORIOLANUS takes us forwards, not
backwards. Instead of uninventing the wheel, it fast-speeds us towards a
modern inferno. Rome and Antium, though keeping
their names, are in Serbo-Croatia. Costumes are
today’s battle fatigues. TV newscasts blurt about a “Roman food crisis” and a
“Volscian border dispute.” The titular Tiberside general – played by shaven-pated Fiennes with a
ferocity he hasn’t shown since SCHINDLER’S LIST – conquers Volscian leader Aufidius
(Gerard Butler). But victory is followed by a leadership election in which
Coriolanus refuses to bare his wounds (ancient Roman equivalent of kissing
babies). He storms from his city, damning its rejecting citizens. The new
ally for revenge, for re-invasion is who but Aufidius?

This is the Shakespeare who wrote about
spin and pressing-the-flesh, about Realpolitik
and reality electioneering, centuries before those concepts became
commonplace. By modernising the play – and hiring HURT LOCKER’s Barry Ackroyd as cinematographer – Fiennes reminds us of its
eternal topicality. We even see a hint of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE in the
hero’s manipulating mother Volumnia. Vanessa
Redgrave plays her as a kind of living human effigy, dry, gaunt, tindery, constantly re-ignited by her passion for power.
She goads her son to compromise his principles to attain high office. When
that fails, she chases him to the border on his armed return to beseech him,
in a blaze of eloquence, to relinquish his vow of vengeance.

Where better than Berlin for this
CORIOLANUS to be premiered? Here its key line, “What
is the city but its people?” has a defining acoustic. For so long Berlin was
everything but the people: a
monstrous, mutating plaything of its civic masters. Now the will of the
people has triumphed; it is their
city. They have terraformed the political desert.
They have banished the monsters of right, then left, who thrived in its
barren byways and highways.

Both these movies are warnings as well as
celebrations. Warnings that chaos can come again and so can confinement. The
invisible wall of warring elements that encircle BelaTarr’s characters belongs in this city of freedom
that was once a jail. Or worse: a jail that looked out across a divide at the
mocking pageant of freedom occupying the other half of the city and, beyond,
the other half of the world.

In CORIOLANUS the atavistic threat of old
aggressions, old spites, returning to their native city holds up its warning. An ancient Rome (even if
disguised on screen as a modern Serbo-Croatia)
speaks to a remade Berlin beset at times by all the old bigotries, the old
ethnic hatreds. Time never sits still, even though it playacts doing so in
THE TURIN HORSE. The words “never again” are too often the preface to the
next apocalypse. They should be uttered only as a prayer, never as a certitude.

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR
CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.